Hacker News: piratejon

New comment by piratejon in "Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes"

piratejon — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 03:57:33 +0000

That's really neat! Seems potentially adaptable to paper currency--a verifiable QR code digital signature of the bill's serial number creates a cryptographically hard obstacle to counterfeiting!

New comment by piratejon in "Starring the Computer"

piratejon — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 19:29:39 +0000

Pairs nicely with https://accessmaincomputerfile.net/ (although that site might not be working any longer).

New comment by piratejon in "The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability"

piratejon — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 14:06:51 +0000

I don't have a basis for how long this might take. As the author mentions "All bugs become shallow once they can be reproduced.", but only after spending probably the largest amount of time waiting for new incident reports to come in, and then analyzing the reports (e.g. to determine most incidents occurred on the last day of the month), and hours staring at application and kernel code. It's very impressive, but certainly the largest amount of time in the 10 month duration was not actually debugging. The "moment of extraordinary clarity" probably sprung out of years of experience.

New comment by piratejon in "The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability"

piratejon — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 13:08:00 +0000

Wow, almost 10 months from the first reported file corruption until identification as an exploitable bug.

New comment by piratejon in "Ask HN: What should I do with my unused 1Gig internet?"

piratejon — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 03:56:01 +0000

Seeding the geocities torrent is kinda cool. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3046

New comment by piratejon in "Longest known exposure photograph ever captured using a beer can"

piratejon — Sat, 12 Dec 2020 09:16:16 +0000

Reading the last paragraph, I did not come away with the same impression you did: "Regina is now a photography technician at Barnet and Southgate College."

New comment by piratejon in "Losing graciously"

piratejon — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 03:21:24 +0000

I think your statement is more true of CentOS than Ubuntu. Many Ubuntu server installations choose it because it is free and reputedly easy, and pass up CentOS because it doesn't have a lot of selling points that appeal directly to non-Linux users, nor RHEL because it costs money.

Also your comment reminds me of an argument against stealing music on the Internet, lol.

New comment by piratejon in "My dad unexpectedly uses my Linux laptop to get real work done"

piratejon — Sun, 27 Oct 2013 04:54:43 +0000

I wanted to voice my concurrence with the sentiment ensconced in the rudeness you are probably being downvoted for: I am in my twenties, generally operate from the perspective of one who thinks he "has shit to do" (in fact I use that very phrase frequently to characterize my obligations and commitments), and don't see myself having time to learn a new tool, method, or technique every time I have a need to express myself, whether professionally or personally. I don't believe this attitude is uncommon and is probably worth taking into consideration by those who would persuade people like your brother and me to use new things. Such as node.js.